Mallick: War crimes trials — from tragedy to farce

Omar Khadr's trial was a disgrace.

The last time the name “Speer” and “war crimes” shared the same courtroom was in Nuremberg in 1946. Then it was Albert Speer on trial for being awfully good at running the Nazi war machine that killed tens of millions.

Fast forward to Guantanamo Prison in 2010 and Omar Khadr’s so-called “war crimes” trial. And I hear “Speer” again, which shocks me. Now it’s sheer coincidence that Albert shares surnames with Sgt. Christopher Speer, an American medic who did harm to no one and died in Afghanistan, but it’s an unusual name that echoes, first heard in a noble court and then in a shameful American off-brand sideshow 64 years later.

Times change. I feel a freak for even noticing the name, but I often feel lonely when I mention the quirky little details of modern history. What’s the point? It’s about as useful as knowing that Austrian monster Josef Fritzl’s favourite TV show is Two and Half Men. We wash the details and concepts of the 20th century from our brains. At our peril.

The Khadr trial has been a disgrace from start to finish, but the idiocy of it was left to sentencing, when Sgt. Speer’s widow fist-pumped the air and cheered as a boy-man out of Dickens was given a 40-year sentence for killing her husband.

Cheering is for game shows, not courtrooms.

It is doubtful, as Star reporter Michelle Shephard has written, that Khadr even threw the grenade that killed Speer, Khadr being badly wounded and half-buried at the time. Further, Khadr was 15, a child soldier with an embarrassing starter moustache told to fight off an American attack on Afghanistan for the crime of harbouring the one guy the U.S. couldn’t “smoke out,” as they put it.

Khadr an “illegal combatant”? That’s Newspeak for an enemy, unlike the Nazis, that doesn’t wear uniforms, advance in phalanxes or march in daylight on a stony plain. The Americans, as unable to cope with the Taliban’s guerrilla warfare as they were with the Viet Cong’s, were flummoxed and so they invented fudge words to describe a raggle-taggle army.

Forty years strikes me as an overlong sentence, even if Khadr’s plea deal gets him only eight. It’s a number plucked out of the air by a military jury. If it was a war crime, why not 87 years? Or 106?

Speer got 20 years, which seems puny considering the crime, but he spent his time producing two astonishing books in tiny handwriting on toilet paper that his guards smuggled out of Spandau Prison. Inside the Third Reich and Spandau: The Secret Diaries added immeasurably to our understanding of organized evil.

The problem with sentencing Speer and his cohort, as the Nuremberg prosecutors well knew, was that only the losers are charged with war crimes. Defense secretary Robert McNamara, a war criminal by his own assessment, once said the U.S. could have been prosecuted for the early bombing raids on Japanese cities that killed many more people than at Hiroshima or Nagasaki. But the Allies won that war. McNamara helped design those raids. He couldn’t believe what he’d gotten away with.

The U.S. and its allies, including Canada, have lost this war, merely extending it to Pakistan. But the losers have greater military might, so a shattered widow named Tabitha Speer has been conned into some kind of deluded hurrah that justice has been done. It hasn’t.

Khadr’s arrest wasn’t fair. His torture was Talibanic. His courtroom was a mockery. His parents got away with mental child abuse. His own country, Canada, which doesn’t even jail a Canadian soldier for finishing off a wounded Afghan “illegal combatant,” has shown itself to be craven and dishonest when asked to cope with the mistreatment of one of its own citizens.

It’s a shameful excuse for a country that won’t take responsibility for its own citizens. It’s not a war crime. It’s just cowardice.

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